Micah A. Hughes, Shariq A. Siddiqui

First published: 08 October 2024

https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.70002Digital Object Identifier (DOI) view metrics

ABSTRACT

The study of Muslim philanthropy is often described as an emerging, multidisciplinary space of inquiry that takes contemporary Muslim practices of generosity such as giving and volunteering alongside behavioral motivations as objects of analysis. This emerging field follows over a century of knowledge production about Islamic charitable practices and institutions stemming from early orientalist studies of legal texts on endowments to more contemporary sociological and anthropological analyses of ritual exchange and giving across various Muslim-majority and minority societies and communities. As the study of Muslim philanthropy grows, these two literatures are often brought together in generative, if uneven ways. In this paper, we review key themes and questions in the study of Islamic charity and ask what impact it has had on the study of Muslim philanthropy. This article surveys recent literature on charitable endowments/trusts (waqf), obligatory alms giving (zakat), and “extemporaneous charity” (sadaqa). We end with an analysis of dominant definitions of philanthropy currently used in philanthropic studies to argue that non-denominational categories like “religious charity” exclude many religious practices that Muslims consider central to their charitable actions and their motivations, a point crucially missing in much philanthropy literature.

1 Introduction

The study of Muslim philanthropy is an emerging, multidisciplinary space of inquiry that takes both historical and contemporary Muslim practices of generosity and beneficence and their motivations as objects of analysis. We note that it is an emerging field, specifically in the Euro-American academy, despite over a century of knowledge production about Islamic charitable practices and institutions stemming from early orientalist studies of legal texts on endowments (waqfpl. awqaf) to more contemporary sociological and anthropological analyses of ritual exchange across various Muslim-majority and minority societies and communities.

The academic study of philanthropy is itself a rather new field of research, institutionally taking shape in the 1980s, and has frequently been associated with management, policy, and development-based fields of study such as public policy, public administration, and nonprofit studies.¹ These approaches to philanthropy emphasize nonprofit management, fundraising, and best practices in the administration of nongovernmental third-sector organizations such as foundations and nonprofits. Moreover, in the social sciences, empirical-scientific research into philanthropy often focuses on issues related to donor giving patterns, economic incentives, social psychology, institutional and individual motivations. In these fields, philanthropy is frequently spoken about as a dynamic, universal human behavior, albeit expressed through or rooted in cultural customs and religious traditions.² Yet, historians of philanthropy have argued that despite the ubiquity of charitable practices across many human societies, the development of philanthropic discourses in Europe and America derive from a “secularized” Christian discourse of charity (caritas) which emerged from both Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions and practices.³ This geneology at times remains obscured in contemporary studies of philanthropy rooted in qualitative social science. Moreover, with the ascendancy of behavioral social sciences in philanthropic studies, scholars have frequently argued that philanthropy is a fundamental expression of a uniquely human tendency to engage in pro-social behavior and altruistic reciprocity, while the precise nature of that behavior and its justifications have been the topic of debate and disagreement across these same disciplines.⁴

Scholarship on Muslim charitable practices spans the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, and religious studies, and has historically been analyzed under the rubric of Islamic charity rather than Muslim philanthropy, a rather new term for a subfield of “religious philanthropy,” typically focused on religious giving and volunteer behavior.⁵ While philanthropic studies’ emphasis tends toward empirical research and applied practice (e.g., fundraising and nonprofit leadership), the study of Islamic charity began as largely textual-historical and has become increasingly ethnographic and sociological in nature. For example, there is a growing body of excellent literature on the legal and socio-political landscape of charitable endowments in Islamicate history,⁶ the formation of soup kitchens in the Ottoman Empire,⁷ and the theological and legal debates about the “alms-tax,” or zakat, and other forms of voluntary, extemporaneous charity known as sadaqa.⁸ With the rise of social history and socio-cultural anthropology of Muslim-majority societies in the twentieth century, scholars have turned toward the examination of religious practices in the context of everyday life, spanning from the medieval Mediterranean to the modern state and the forms of social life that practices presuppose and sometimes contest.⁹

As the study of Muslim philanthropy grows across the disciplinary boundaries of nonprofit studies, sociology and anthropology, and Islamic studies, these bodies of scholarship are brought together in generative, if uneven ways. Philanthropic studies draws from historical and anthropological literature on Islamic charity to frame the central concepts of Muslim philanthropy, while also collecting empirical data through surveys focused on perceptions, motivations, and practices of Muslim individuals, households, and organizations operating in various social and geographical contexts. Despite the complexity of Islamic charitable practices, in philanthropic scholarship it has largely become synonymous with “Muslim giving” or “in-kind donations.” As a consequence of this limited scope, how the practice of Islamic charity/Muslim philanthropy extend beyond the definitional boundaries of philanthropic studies’ emphases on giving and volunteerism are obscured. Moreover, the different conceptual orientations of these disciplinary modes of inquiry as well as the quality of their interventions become ill defined. As a result, scholars interested in “Muslim philanthropy” or “Islamic charity” as a interdisciplinary object of study are forced to consider some questions about how to define, locate, and translate these socio-legal ideas and practices across discursive contexts as well as different academic fields in which its study is embedded.

In this paper, we look at the modern university-based, academic study of Islamic charity and its impact on the study of Muslim philanthropy, especially as it raises important questions for scholars working in philanthropic studies in the Euro-American context. We do this through a critical overview of recent literature on charitable endowments/trusts (waqf), obligatory alms giving (zakat), and charity (sadaqa). We argue that dominant definitions of philanthropy currently used in philanthropic studies to analyze religious charity not only exclude many practices that Muslims consider central to their charitable actions, but they also functionally limit the study of philanthropy to an overly narrow definition of “Muslim giving” while excluding other modes of charitable engagement.¹⁰ Secondly, we trace how a renewed focus on charitable practices as a part of an embodied, discursive tradition calls into question these dominant definitions of philanthropy broadly used in social scientific literature on philanthropy today. Lastly, we draw from questions raised in the study of Islamic charity to open up discussion about the future of the study of Muslim philanthropy and philanthropic studies.

2 Locating the (Historical-Anthropological) Study of Islamic Charity

Early European orientalists and colonial observers wrote extensively on the socio-economic institutions of Muslim life with particular interest in the institution of the waqf or “pious endowment/trust.” Due to its centrality as a socio-economic and religious institution, early studies on Islamic charity focused heavily on the waqf.¹¹ While orientalists were not always directly involved in governing colonized Muslim populations as they were in British India or French Algeria, the knowledge which they produced—their various translations, commentaries, and textual analyses of Islamic law and Muslim history—were often utilized by colonial officials to make policies and form legal judgments about how to govern Muslim subjects of empire.¹² For example, David Powers has demonstrated how, “the [French] colonial administration endeavored to gain control over the endowment institution through a series of legislative enactments and was assisted by French orientalists who campaigned to discredit the institution among the Algerians themselves.”¹³ This act of discrediting was important for colonial governments and imperial powers because, as Barnes has estimated, by the 19th century nearly two-thirds of property in territories such as the Ottoman Empire were held as waqfs and, thus, restricted from certain capital market pressures and forces.¹⁴

According to Hoexter, the field of waqf studies has undergone several transformations from its initial emergence as a site of colonial land appropriation and control. The work of early-to-mid 20th century orientalists focused on the “legal aspects of waqf,” drawing attention to its etymology, its earliest references in Islamicate textual sources, and its legal-operational mechanism of ownership and inheritance.¹⁵ Moreover, there was a concomitant development of waqf studies outside of the Euro-American academy, one example being Turkish scholars writing in the journal Vakıflar Dergisi, which sought to analyze the “historical, legal, social, and artistic elements” of the waqf in Ottoman and Turkish life.¹⁶ This focus on history of Islamic charitable practices and institutions was part of a broader shift in post-imperial, Muslim-majority polities which sought to translate the institutions of Muslim social and political life into the new configurations of the modern, secular state.¹⁷ Later orientalist-trained scholars, such as Gabriel Baer, and their students (e.g., Miriam Hoexter and Aharon Layish) focused their efforts on historicizing the waqf as a dynamic institution of social life beyond its legal and textual basis.¹⁸

The work of Amy Singer deserves particular attention in that she has not only deepened our historical knowledge of the waqf as an institution of (Ottoman-) Islamic social life, but has connected it to other charitable practices, often comparing and contrasting contemporary Western notions of charity and aid with early modern religious institutions of communal welfare and piety.¹⁹ For example, Singer reflects on the conservative nature of the waqf when compared to current practices which of social welfare which, at times, seek to radically transform the present social order through the eradication of social ills:

For the most part, endowments were conservative in their purposes, funding activities that reinforced the dominant values of a society: the place of religion and ritual; the accepted curriculum of study and the goal of education; the physical elements of cities; the conventional practice of medicine; the preservation of family wealth; and the status of the poor as poor and dependent. Much of the poor relief distributed through waqfs was aimed at guaranteeing subsistence or providing relief rather than what is today called development aid, whose goal is to end poverty and dependence. Much good work was accomplished, but it did not have radical aims such as the redistribution of wealth, the promotion of general literacy or the eradication of need.²⁰

Singer’s important caveat should not be read as a wholesale rejection of the waqf as a contemporary tool for achieving social justice. In fact, many Muslim intellectuals, scholars, and activities writing today argue that the waqf is precisely the kind of tool necessary to achieve equity, welfare, and to combat poverty.²¹ Yet, the historical practice of waqf-making and the discoursive and conceptual practices that surround it have, like so many other areas of social life, been transformed by the modern nation-state project.

While 19th colonial regimes sought to dismantle the waqf system in order to open it to private interests, the work of Moumtaz (2021) has shown how Muslim governing authorities also sought to reorganize and centralize the waqf in order to bring it into accord with new administrative state forms in Lebanon.²² Moumtaz traces what she calls, following Talal Asad and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the shifting “grammar of concepts,” that is, how the meaning of the waqf changed as it encountered new historical configurations (land regimes, economic systems, governing styles) which structure its usage.²³ While the waqf can be used to serve the general public (waqf khayri) in perpetuity, it can also be endowed for the sake of the one’s family (waqf ahli). Moumtaz (2018) has further shown how the family (and thus the family waqf) came under increasing suspicion as a legitimate object of charity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.²⁴ This suspicion was shaped by transformations in the concept of religion and economy as distinct spheres of life, in which the waqf was reimagined as belonging concretely to the latter category. One’s own family was no longer considered to be a legitimate object of charity, and instead was seen as an example of corruption at worst or nepotism at best. In this way, Moumtaz’s work asks us to consider not just changes in charitable practices and institutions, but how the aims and objectives of charity such as “the public” or “the poor” are not given in advance, but emerge as a result of novel state policies and their attendant discourses.

Given the centrality of notions of national economy and development in the operation of the modern state, the waqf became a central locus of administrative intervention and appropriation. In the Republic of Turkey, waqfs were brought into the national economy and taken over by various ministries in the 1920s and 30s, partially returned to their various constituencies in the 1950s and 60s, and eventually transformed into modern day voluntary sector institutions (foundations and NGOs) by neoliberal policies and economic reforms from the 1980s–2000s.²⁵ In Indonesia, the waqf underwent transformation from what Muslim modernist reformers called “dead” to “productive” property by connecting waqfs to modern universities and education geared toward cultivating learned Muslim citizens. While some Indonesian Muslim activists focused their efforts on institutionalizing zakat collection via state bodies in hopes of formalizing the relationship between Islam and the state, waqfs were mainly the concern of Muslim civil society groups who sought to harness its wealth and property for their own purposes.²⁶

Waqfs have also been imagined as a solution to problems of the welfare gap in various postcolonial states. Gizem Zencirci has shown how the Republic of Turkey, while not a postcolonial state per se, nevertheless sought to subject the waqf economy of the Ottoman Empire to the machinations of modern, Republican state ministries and their developmentalist policies for state building purposes. For example, waqfs became central to the welfare policies of the AK Party in the 2000s.²⁷ Elsewhere, in 2006, the government of India released a report on the “social, economic, and educational status of Muslims in India,” called the Sachar Committee Report, which argued that “better utilization of Waqf properties, productive utilization of monies available through traditional systems of charity like Zakaat [sic] for education and health and more active participation in democratic processes would help the [Muslim] Community in a significant manner.”²⁸ Abdullah (2020) has further argued that, given the scale of the waqf in India (half a million registered properties and six hundred thousand acres) and its centrality as a “philanthropic institution,” it should be leveraged as a “a cost-effective redistribution of wealth” to further develop resources of Muslims as a national minority.²⁹ This work shows how modern Muslim activists, intellectuals, and politicians have reimagined the waqf, especially the cash waqf, as a welfare solution to the problems of contemporary global inequality. Furthermore, while the waqf might be understood as an Islamic institution, modern reappraisals have subjected it to a different logic—managerial and developmentalist in nature—from the logic of preceding generations which sought to make forms of wealth inalienable for the sake of God and for the benefit of clearly defined constituencies.

3 Zakat, Sadaqa, and the State

While the rise of scientific philanthropy was bolstered as a modern solution to extemporaneous (Christian) charity’s perceived failure to address root causes, thus effecting structural change,

recent anthropological studies of Muslim giving practices push us to reconsider this moral hierarchy of philanthropy over charity. Studies by P. Anderson (2011), Fauzia (2013), Mittermaier (2014, 2019, 2020, 2021), Schaeublin (2019), Henig (2019), and Merriman (2021), and Abubakar (2020) have turned to the intimacies of direct social interaction and exchange that structure giving alms (zakat) and charity (sadaqa) in Muslim communities today.

The developmental logics of capitalist modernity have globalized the charity-philanthropy divide as well as raised questions about the role of neoliberal policies and institutions in the giving of charity.³⁰ Atia (2013) argues that in Egypt, Islamic charity is increasingly articulated alongside a vision of Islamic economics (primarily banking) that together form what she calls “pious neoliberalism.”³¹ Pious neoliberalism expresses a middle-class sentiment that Islamic ethical norms are partially commensurate with the values, institutions, and procedures of capitalist economics and follow market orientations and logics in calculating otherworldly rewards for positive social action undertaken during one’s life. Iqbal’s (2022) recent study of humanitarian and refugee relief programs in Jordan has argued against this framing of Islamic charity and humanitarianism as exclusively a form of neoliberal piety, and instead has shown that the mode of calculating rewards and punishments occurs on the basis of viewing both wealth and poverty as potential “divine tribulations” (Arabic: ‘ibtila) which exceed the neoliberal market logic of cost-benefit analysis emphasized in the literature on “pious neoliberalism.”³² Cihan Tuğal’s intervention in the study of charity and charitable associations has further argued that there is a spectrum of attitudes toward charity in countries like Turkey and Egypt that range from neoliberal to communitarian and are shaped by the “uneven development of liberalism and capitalism.”³³ Tuğal’s (2017) work interrogates ethical and charitable forms shaped by capitalist forces, while Iqbal’s approach emphasizes the internal logic of Islamic traditions shaped by a divine economy of action.

As seen above, the study of religious charity provides a unique opportunity to consider how modern political and civic forms relate to religious practices and shape subjectivities. Muslim scholars and activists take up a range of attitudes toward the charitable work they do, sometimes downplaying its political significance arguing they are motivated by love of God alone rather than concern for the poor, and at times using charity to articulate a critique of the welfare state and its perceived failures.³⁴ Mouftah’s (2017) ethnographic study of the Egyptian NGO, Life Makers, shows how voluntary associations have emerged as site of religious reform that redefine Islamic ethical notions of “good works” while eschewing discourses of “political Islam” as their site of critical intervention.³⁵ Yet, Mouftah shows how this attempt to circumvent politics is not an escape from the domain of the political, because the very volunteerism of Life Makers is an attempt to reshape the “boundaries of religion and politics.”³⁶ Mouftah’s work builds on that of Amira Mittermaier and others, who reflects on the ambiguities of construing Islamic practice as “non-political,” that is, somewhere between the abstractions of “religion” and “politics” while eschewing the claim to secular neutrality central to so many liberal conceptions of the state-society relations.

Perhaps no other recent book has done as much as Mittermaier’s Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times (2019) to reorient what “religious giving” or “Islamic charity” means in the context of modern political transformations. Her study takes seriously the motivational claim that Muslims who volunteer and give their time and money to help the poor in Egypt in the aftermath of the 2011 revolutions do so because God has obliged them to. Mittermaier suggests that giving to God should be taken as a serious claim, the dimensions of which needs to be explored ethnographically in order to understand contemporary charity (which she calls “ethics of giving”) as a disruptive act despite the fact that it not (always and only) an act of radical or progressive philanthropy aimed at structural critique of economic inequality.³⁷

The work of May (2020) and Abraham (2020) show how zakat has been mobilized by various social actors in the UK and India respectively as radical solutions to the fragmentation of social bonds in precarious economic situations.³⁸ These studies have proven to be invaluable analyses of how giving within the Islamic tradition extends beyond altruistic behavior and into the realm of worship. Moreover, these approaches demonstrate how worship practices have real social and economic effects while also being subject to scrutiny and surveillance on behalf of state security apparatuses. As Abraham says: “In the social realm, the giving and receiving of zakat binds people to each other, reminding them that human well-being is ultimately linked, collective, and sustained through mutual support and recognition.”³⁹

The Muslim charitable sector has also emerged as a robust component of the Euro-American philanthropic landscape. Lucas Faure’s work on “Franco-British” Muslim NGO’s traces how Muslim charitable and humanitarian organizations cross national boundaries and develop simultaneously local and global foci, all the while being shaped by the legal and political contexts of national security regimes at home.⁴⁰ In the UK, May has shown how “the perceived need for specifically “Muslim” charities is derived from religious understandings and injunctions and a non-state-centric conception of obligation,” specifically the collection and distribution of zakat since sadaqa can be given to Muslim as well as non-Muslim charitable causes.⁴¹

Importantly, the above work draws from the ethnographic and historical analysis of Jonathan Benthall, who has written extensively about the politics of aid, charity, and development in the “Muslim World.” His attentiveness to the social and political context in which non-governmental actors operate in the Middle East and in Muslim-majority societies has demonstrated the dynamism of NGO-actors working in radically unequal terrains from their larger, Western counterparts. By showing the diverse ideological viewpoints and activities of so-called faith-based NGOs and religious actors, his work has sought to combat the caricature of Muslim civil society as a front for imagined nefarious political/religious activities.⁴²

4 Data and Interpretation: American Muslim Philanthropy

Lastly, we turn our attention to recent work in the study of Muslim philanthropy in the United States. We focus on this last case study, because it raises important definitional questions regarding the transformation of Islamic charity into the academic study of Muslim philanthropy which we have been exploring thus far. As Freeman (2022) has argued, Islam has played a critical, yet overlooked, role “in the moral imaginations behind and the communal practices of African American philanthropy” at large.⁴³ The history of Muslim giving in the United States is deeply rooted in African American Muslim communities and practices, often through informal networks and associations based in mutual aid societies.⁴⁴ Diouf (1999, 2022) traces early accounts of Muslim philanthropy in the Americas (North, South, and the Caribbean). One powerful example is the practice of enslaved women baking and distributing “saraka cakes,” a West African Muslim form of almsgiving that continued on in the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina.⁴⁵

Despite this rich history, academic literature on contemporary U.S. Muslim giving has centered around building formal nonprofit institutions like mosques, schools, relief organizations, advocacy organizations, national umbrella groups, and other configurations to help institutionalize the diversity of Muslim practices in the United States. Despite such a long and often overlooked history of charity, mutual aid, and community-based entrepreneurship, most Muslim charitable organizations operating today were established after 1980, and as such, have received the most attention in the literature. Bagby (2022), referencing the work of Edward Curtis, claims that “philanthropy among African American Muslims [such as the Nation of Islam and others] has, therefore, centered on a cause, aimed at uplifting the individual and building a community, and thereby enabling a resistance to the injustice and oppression that African Americans suffer in America” (13). Moreover, Bagby has conducted a series of mosque surveys over many decades in order to fill this gap in the academic literature on American Muslims.⁴⁶

Qualitatively speaking, until recently very little was known about how, where, and how much Muslim Americans give. Most quantitative and public policy focused studies were focused on monetary donations alone. This overemphasis on monetary donations and Muslim nonprofits was not simply a scholarly preoccupation but was shaped by the post-9/11 environment in which new finance laws, security practices, and methods of state surveillance specifically targeted U.S.-based Muslims and Muslim organizations, such as the Holy Land Foundation among others.⁴⁷

A donor-centric focus on nonprofit management utilizing the concept of “religious philanthropy,” and drawn from a mostly Protestant Christian conception of “charity” has also played an impactful role in contemporary scholarship. As Khader and Siddiqui (2018) have argued, the data on Muslim American giving requires more careful analysis not only at the level of interpreting the data, but also in terms of survey design and methodology.⁴⁸ According to the 2017 American Muslim Giving Poll conducted by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), U.S.-based Muslims give less to houses of worship than their counterparts. A new study conducted by the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative (MPI) confirmed that only 27.45% of American Muslim giving goes to the mosque, while more than half (51.28%) of non-Muslim giving goes to houses of worship. Yet, the MPI study also demonstrates that Muslims give more on average to religious and non-religious causes than the general population.⁴⁹ If Muslim charity is only measured according to a standard of religious giving that takes houses of worship as the axiomatic site of religious charity, then Muslims appear to be less charitable than their counterparts. Some have sought to explain this by pointing to structural inequalities such as poverty and education status of Muslims in America, but this elides a more fundamental and definitional question. How philanthropy and charity are understood and practiced by American Muslims extends beyond the ways that religious philanthropy is traditionally measured. For example, consider this caveat in Giving USA’s 2020 Annual Report:

At present, it is difficult to determine the full picture of giving to religion for American Muslims because many organizations to which Muslims donate fall outside the parameters of religious giving for the purposes of Giving USA. For example, organizations such as Zakat Foundation of America and Islamic Relief USA, though inspired by the Islamic faith, fall under giving to human services and giving to international affairs, respectively.⁵⁰

The issue here is not that Muslims give less on average, but that they give differently than other religious communities, even as their general donation patterns track larger trends in American giving. How religious giving is defined in the field of philanthropic studies is important, precisely because it has the power to exclude or overlook the mechanisms and modes through which Muslims practice charity.⁵¹

The research team of the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative (MPI) at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy recently conducted two representative sample surveys on Muslim American giving patterns and motivations. In the 2022 survey, participants were asked how, where, and to what causes they give. Additionally, they were asked substantive questions designed to assess how they perceived almsgiving (zakat)—whether it was more akin to a religious tax, a form of charity, or a type of philanthropy. While most consider zakat an act of charity rather than a tax, the study also found that Muslim Americans have a more expansive understanding of philanthropy than either monetary or in-kind donations. Muslim Americans were more likely to consider sadaqa and zakat to be both “helping behaviors” and forms of “charitable giving” in way the reflect Prophetic precedent in the hadith literature.⁵²

Finally, it is important to mention the increased securitization and state surveillance of Muslim philanthropy affecting both individuals and nonprofits in light of Global War on Terror policies inaugurated after 9/11. Following the Bush administration’s policy emphasis on tracking so-called financial sources of terrorism, individual Muslims and Muslim led-charities in the United States grew increasingly fearful of providing documented cash or in-kind donations to Muslim charities and causes due to both a real and perceived threat of state surveillance of their financial transactions. James (2010) has traced an emerging post-9/11 paradigm of charitable giving and organizational presentation she calls “risk-based philanthropy.” Risk-based philanthropy is premised on the government’s suspicion that charitable funds are being diverted to so-called “terrorist organizations” or causes, and as a result produces both surveillance and anticipation of surveillance felt by individuals as well as across communities. As a result, Muslim charities and non-profits adopt a risk-based philanthropic approach which (over-)emphasizes “best practices” in a manner that can have chilling effects on Muslim organizational spaces and communal financial practices.⁵³

5 Contesting Definitions

Philanthropy names a multiplicity of often, but not exclusively, institutionalized social and civic practices such as volunteerism, monetary donations, foundation grant giving, and more. In this final section, we explore issues with mapping common definitions of philanthropy onto Muslim charitable practices. In a now frequently referenced definition, Payton (1988) defined philanthropy as “voluntary action for the public good.”⁵⁴ Payton and Moody revisited and expanded this definition in their book, Understanding Philanthropy (2008), by designating two outcomes at which philanthropy aims: “(1) to relieve the suffering of others for whom one has no formal or legal responsibility, and (2) to improve the quality of life in the community, however one defines that idea.”⁵⁵ We would like to focus our attention on the voluntary action component of Payton’s definition, while also raising some concerns with philanthropy’s general aims that emerge in recent scholarly literature on the subject. We leave unaddressed Payton and Moody’s “public good” claim recognize that the public/private distinction is also a major theoretical problematic in need of careful consideration and revision when applied universally to concrete configurations of social and economic life.⁵⁶

Payton and Moody are interested in returning the study of philanthropy to questions of morality and value by emphasizing “good works” as a central component of philanthropy.⁵⁷ Yet, they only briefly mention zakat in the context of philanthropy’s “religious origins” while continuing to define philanthropy through the lens of voluntary action.⁵⁸ Implicit in their definition is a distinction between religious charity and modern scientific philanthropy, albeit a distinction that Payton and Moody wish to revisit. Benjamin Soskis has taken up the historical-conceptual rift between charity and philanthropy, noting that philanthropy is often described in a Weberian vain. If charity was a motivational Christian virtue (caritas) that partially constituted the socio-economic fabric of Euro-American societies until the 19th and 20th centuries, then the rise of scientific philanthropy as a movement (inaugurated by the Carnegies and Rockefellers) marked the “rationalization of charity” as a systematic enterprise.⁵⁹ While this is true of the late modern scientific philanthropy movement, Marty Sulek has argued that the early modern discourse of philanthropy was rooted in a humanistic conception of moral virtue and was not yet distinct from religious ideas of charity as such.⁶⁰ Moreover, Marxist-inspired traditions have critiqued both charity and philanthropy as covering over forms of structural exploitation and alienation under the guise of public good.⁶¹ The genealogy of Islamic charity, while at times reflective of these debates, is not easily mapped onto the charity-philanthropy divide in either its Marxist or liberal forms.⁶²

While philanthropy is commonly defined as voluntary action, the application of this definition to practices of Muslim charity and its motivations immediately fails to account for the social, ethical, and legal vision enshrined in acts of zakat, or alms-giving, mentioned explicitly in the Qur’an and elaborated on in great detail in Islamic legal texts as well as in the accounts of Muslim volunteers.⁶³ Namely that zakat is considered an obligatory act of worship, sometimes described as a tax and connected to theories of governance and economy, through which one purifies their wealth by giving a percentage of their surplus to eight prescribed categories.⁶⁴ Yet zakat cannot be neatly contained under the idea of “religious worship” distinguished from its political, economic, and social effects, since zakat is directed toward the redistribution of wealth. As Danielle Widmann Abraham notes: “Zakat works through the logic of redistribution to transfer resources from those who have surplus to those who are in need. Insofar as zakat is given to those who are vulnerable—orphans and the destitute, among others—it functions as a strategy of collective protection and communal integration.”⁶⁵ Additionally, zakat binds different social strata together through collective acts of worship and transactional obligations.

There is another way in which recent scholarship on zakat challenges Payton and Moody’s definition of philanthropy. Giving zakat is not only an obligation for the believing person, but is also part of an Islamic discourse of rights, in which the poor have a right to claim what is theirs, while those with means have an obligation to give it.⁶⁶ In his analysis of direct zakat giving in Nablus, Palestine, Emmanuel Schaeublin shows that while the poor have a right to zakat, social stigmas and norms around exposing poverty result in face-to-face acts of charity where one’s needs are “covered” or disguised in social interaction.⁶⁷ This ethnographic account illuminates how abstract principles around zakat are elaborated and transformed in the rich context of social relations. A somewhat contrasting sentiment was expressed directly by a leader of a US-based Muslim charity addressing income inequality, who when asked in an interview why they undertake the work they do, pointed to their obligation as a Muslim and remarked that they tell their clients—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—not to be ashamed to ask for assistance as it is their right in the eyes of God to receive it.⁶⁸

When we turn to extemporaneous charity (sadaqa), a much more expansive category, we are somewhat closer to Payton and Moody’s definition, but with some important caveats. Sadaqa is not limited to monetary or in-kind donations, but encompasses a large repertoire of ethical practices of care, concern, and cultivation. For example, an oft-quoted hadith of the Prophet Muhammad lists forbidding evil and smiling among acts of sadaqa to be realized by Muslims in their daily lives.⁶⁹ Furthermore, while philanthropy emphasizes action, sadaqa also includes inaction, or abstention from actions that may cause harm. For modern philanthropic studies, it becomes difficult to account for these forms of social interaction and the moral economy in which they occur due to a limited definition of philanthropy that overemphasizes donors, funds, and strictly positive behavioral economic approaches to internal motivations.⁷⁰

6 Conclusion

In this article we have not sought an exhaustive account of Muslim philanthropy or Islamic charity as fields of study. Given the size of the literature and its disciplinary spread, it would be difficult if not impossible to do justice such a large geographical and temporal range. We have not, for example, attended to the important work emerging in the study of Muslim humanitarianism.⁷¹ Rather, we have focused our attention on the development of the field of Islamic charity and some definitional questions which have emerged in the literature which could be posed to the more policy oriented and survey based field of Muslim philanthropy. Furthermore, we have limited our analysis to the study of waqf, zakat, and sadaqa, and surveyed how recent literature has reinvigorated the study of Islamic charity in order to rethink various hegemonic categories which circulate across these two areas and objects of study.

Moreover, we have argued that the development of Islamic charity and philanthropy as objects of study have now extended beyond the examination of Muslim philanthropy in terms of theology or legal and social history alone, instead addressing more recent anthropological and survey research that seeks to inform how Muslims, especially U.S.-based Muslims, practice philanthropy while negotiating religious, civic, and community identity. Finally, this article shows how recent anthropologically informed work pushes against conceptions of Muslim philanthropy that romanticize, demonize, or otherwise definitionally restrict Muslim practice to a generic notion of “religious giving.” Emerging scholarly and disciplinary frames rooted in a more conceptually robust understanding of the specificities of Muslim practice and values, while at the same time acknowledging the shared social space of philanthropic action under the legal regimes and civic spaces of the modern nation-sate, can more accurately address the rich and diverse charitable practices that are increasingly known as “Muslim philanthropy.”

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